Ground Truth: 3 Para Return to Afghanistan. Patrick Bishop
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usually came from outside the immediate area and had no ties to corrupt local officials or to tribal leaders. The news that a fort was being built in Hutal which would establish a permanent army presence was welcomed. When Huw Williams arrived back from Kandahar on 4 April, however, he found that progress on the FOB’s construction was being held up. Once again, the district leader was at the root of the problem. Haji Zaifullah had showed little sign of bending to the new wind blowing through his fiefdom. His response to the arrival of construction workers had been to try to divert them away from their task of building the FOB in favour of carrying out improvements to his official residence. When Williams vetoed the project he tried another ruse to wring some advantage from the situation.
It came to light that when truck drivers tried to load sand from a local wadi to fill up the Hesco Bastion containers that formed the walls of the fort, they were stopped by Zaifullah’s men, who demanded a tax for trucking the ballast away. When Williams heard about the new scam he decided to adopt an emollient approach. The politics of the situation left him no other choice. The British were in Afghanistan to reinforce the authority of the government. That meant doing nothing to erode the standing of its local representatives, no matter how venal and corrupt they might be. The CO trod carefully when he called on the district leader to broach the subject: ‘I said that he was obviously a powerful man with much influence in the area and I needed his help.’ Williams explained what had happened at the wadi, without letting on that he knew who was behind the extortion attempts, and warned that if the situation was not sorted out the FOB could not be built.
There was ‘a lot of sucking of teeth’ before Zaifullah admitted that it was he who was taxing the trucks. He claimed that the revenue raised would be used on local services and that the system was ‘good for the people’. Williams countered deftly by saying that in that case he would pay the money himself, directly to the government in Kabul. ‘He said, oh no, you can’t do that, it has to be paid here. I said, well, maybe we can pay it in Kandahar.’ After accepting finally that his bluff had been called, Zaifullah issued a letter exempting the truck drivers from the sand tax.
These encounters were wearing and frustrating but Williams understood the necessity of keeping cool and playing the game. ‘I couldn’t go in there and say “stop taxing me” because I would have been undermining him. I knew that I was dealing with someone who is corrupt but I was conscious of the difference between the person and the office he represented. Sooner or later he would be moved on. But the office would still stand and I couldn’t be seen to be weakening it.’
From the outset, Williams had also done what he could to communicate directly with the local notables, calling a shura soon after his arrival to introduce himself. The meeting took place in the open in the district leader’s compound. About seventy elders turned up, men who owed their authority to their relative wealth or membership of a prominent family. Williams and his team explained their mission and asked their guests for their reactions. The response was sceptical. ‘We got the normal accusations,’ said Williams. ‘That you always come and offer but you never deliver.’ He had decided that the best hope of winning any degree of confidence was to ‘humanise myself so I appeared not just as a Western soldier there on a task. I said I was a family man. [I told them that] we didn’t need to come to Afghanistan but the government that you elected has asked us to.’
Williams had reported his difficulties with Zaifullah to his superiors in Kandahar, who passed the information up the political chain. The district leader’s behaviour was annoying and frustrating. It started to become alarming when it became clear that, contrary to the assurances the Paras had given the farmers, he was determined to mount a poppy eradication programme in the area. On 3 April ANP vehicles that had been escorting a convoy of tractors on their way to destroy some crops came under fire from what were said to be Taliban gunmen in fields about eight kilometres north of Hutal. Jamie Loden received an urgent request from the district leader to help his men. Loden was determined not to embroil his troops in a shoot-out over opium and replied that he would assist in extracting casualties but there would be no question of sending reinforcements. By the end of the day no casualties had been reported. The incident, though, had opened a new and dangerous front in the Brits’ dealings with the local authorities.
Zaifullah’s eagerness to wipe out the poppy crop aroused immediate suspicions. For one thing, he was under no compulsion to do anything about opium cultivation in his district. The government eradication programme was selective. It was only in force in areas where there was a viable alternative cash crop available to growers. That was not the case in Maywand, where, as Huw Williams put it, ‘they grow poppy and get money for it or they starve’. When Zaifullah was challenged he maintained that he was under specific orders from the governor of Kandahar province, Asadullah Khalid, to mount an eradication effort.
Enquiries uncovered an alternative explanation for the district leader’s unusual zeal. Zaifullah, it turned out, had extensive poppy fields of his own. His intention, the Paras suspected, was to wipe out his rivals’ crops in order to increase the value of his own. Rumours were later picked up on the ground that farmers could exempt their produce from the attentions of the police by paying a hefty bribe.
In the absence of any intervention from outside Afghan authorities, Williams had little choice but to appear to cooperate. On the evening of 8 April, Zaifullah visited him and told him that an eradication operation was taking place the following day. By now the distict leader had managed to obtain reinforcements from the provincial ANP to support the local police, who, it was increasingly clear, functioned when needed as his personal militia. Williams agreed to position vehicles from his Patrols Platoon near the fields scheduled for eradication but said they would intervene only if the ANP got into trouble. There would also be air support available if needed. As it was, 9 April passed without incident. The dangers of coalition forces being seen to support the nefarious activities of a notoriously corrupt official were obvious. But still nothing was done by the provincial or national authorities to restrain their man in Maywand.
On 11 April the Paras were told that the police would be carrying out a week-long eradication mission in the area of Now-Khar-Khayl, which lay on a bend of the Arghandab river about sixteen kilometres south-east of Hutal. Williams agreed that Patrols Platoon would watch over Afghan policemen involved in the operation but go to their aid only if they were in serious difficulties. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts reported that the Taliban were aware of the operation and were prepared to attack the police once the work got under way.
The operation began the following day. Around noon, Patrols Platoon heard gunfire coming from the fields. Williams ordered it to stay put and await instructions. The district leader, however, radioed his men to tell them to stand and fight, shoring their morale with the news that the British would shortly be coming to their rescue. When it became clear that no reinforcements were on the way he contacted Williams with ever more alarming reports from the battlefield. Just after 1 p.m. he claimed that fifteen to twenty of his men were dead and those remaining were running out of ammunition.
Williams was sceptical. He requested an overflight by a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with an on-board camera. The images it beamed back told a less dramatic story. There was no sign of any major clash and the Paras stayed put. The district leader’s appeals had also been relayed back to Kandahar via the ANP. The Americans responded by sending two attack helicopters. They hovered over the supposed battlefield but found nothing to report and returned without engaging. The true story of what happened in the fields of Now-Khar-Khayl never emerged. It seemed probable that any shooting directed at the ANP was as likely to have come from farmers defending their livelihood as from the Taliban. In this instance, the two groups could have been one and the same thing.
Zaifullah’s failure to inveigle British forces into backing him rankled and he complained to the governor of Kandahar, Asadullah Khalid, to whom he was closely allied. The governor backed his protégé in Maywand, issuing a media statement claiming that a senior British officer in the district was encouraging local farmers to grow poppies. The row bubbled up the political chain until it reached Kabul and the British envoy Sherard Cowper-Coles. The ambassador dismissed the accusation and declared that the Paras were obeying the government’s own instructions, which stated that the eradication programme did not apply to Maywand. The row subsided, but in the Paras’ eyes the district